Self-Improvement Tips

Category Archives: Mind tips and hacks

Control your anger or it will control you.

Control your anger as it can cloud your ability to make good decisions and find creative solutions to problems. It can negatively affect your work performance.

With insight about the real reasons for your anger and learning anger management techniques, you will be able to control your anger and keep your temper from hijacking your life.

Control you anger, don’t let your anger control you. The emotion of anger is not always a negative feeling to experience. In fact, being angry in some ways can be a positive outlet and something that should not be ignored. However, having rage inside that results in harmful tendencies towards ourselves or other people, and from which the source is painful experience, is not healthy at all. This type of anger should be dealt with, before it escalates into more negative experiences, as it may destroy our relationships, limit our opportunities, and even damage our health. Control your anger because it is just ONE Letter away from danger.

Having trouble controlling anger is a major issue in many individual’s lives. Addressing this issue can be difficult if the person is unwilling to admit to their problem and seek help. It is imperative that people be supportive and encouraging to those with anger issues. At times it may seem impossible since these people can be hurtful and even violent. Helping them to realize they need help would be the initial step to controlling their anger.
According to psychologist T.W. Smith, anger is “an unpleasant emotion ranging in intensity from irritation or annoyance to fury or rage.”
In order to control your anger, there are some anger management techniques which you can use when you find yourself in a stressful situation. But keep in mind that these strategies are only a general guide. If anger continues to be a problem, you might need to seek the help of a suitably qualified health professional, especially if your anger hurts others, or if it causes you physical pain or emotional distress.

When your temper starts to raise, mentally challenge yourself before taking out your anger on others. Ask yourself these questions: What is the source of my irritation? What is the degree of my anger? What is the other person’s actual role in the situation? Then turn the circumstances around to see how you would want to be treated if the other person felt as you do. These mental gymnastics will help you to control your anger, and regain control over your runaway emotions before they escape and cause external damage.

In those moments when you feel the familiar rage start to flare, excuse yourself if others are present and take a quick walk down the hall or outdoors, depending on whether you are at home or at work, and the weather conditions. Take a 5 to10 minute stroll, especially one that is fast paced. It will help you to control your anger, and cool your irritation as you practice the fight-or-flight strategy by escaping the potential conflict. This is one of the most popular and useful anger management techniques. “A moment of patience in a moment of anger saves you a thousand moments of regret”.

Another technique recommended for anger management is relaxation. Angry feelings and emotions can be calmed down by relaxing exercises such as deep breathing, relaxing imagery and slow nonstrenuous exercise similar to ygoa. When you become irritated and headed for a fit of anger, it is suggested that by breathing deeply from your diaphragm will help you to relax. Also by using relaxing imagery, allowing your mind and thought to go to a happy place, or a past relaxing experience may help you to calm down and control your anger.

Problem solving is another anger management technique. It is important for an individual to discover the reason for their anger. Anger is a natural response to certain situations and at times it is an acceptable reaction but there are other incidents when the anger is not appropriate. There is a reason for the anger and to every problem there is said to be a solution. When a situation arises, the individual is taught not to focus on the solution but rather the problem. Finding ways to handle the problem and confront it is the main objective in this anger management technique. It may take a while to conform to this plan, but it is important to stick to it, as eventually the answers will come.

Another great anger management technique is to write down your thoughts and emotions during a fit of anger. Sometimes sharing or talking to someone else about your feelings may only cause extra conflict. Whereas by Writing or journalizing, not only you will be able to get your feelings off your chest, but also it will help you to calm down and control your anger. Using writing as an anger management technique may also help in the future when trying to find the triggers which cause the angry outbursts. Being able to look back over the information written may provide you with reasons for your anger through reading about similar incidents.

Taking a vacation, spending some alone time is another good anger management tip which can help you to control your anger tendencies. Removing yourself from the environment which seems to frustrate and irritate you may be a wise idea. Being able to get away and reflect on your actions may help you to look at things differently. Given space and time may be positive for a person with anger issues.

Write out a response to a problem before tackling it orally or in debate. This will give you time to think about the best approach to a problem rather than responding with random anger.

Some people suggest prayer and meditation as anger management tips. Both of these suggestions involve very personal practices for an individual. Given a chance to pray and be alone with one’s thoughts is a good way to release tension and let the pressures of life wash away. Letting go of feelings of anger and negative thoughts would definitely make a positive change in a person’s life. Through prayer and meditation not only you are able to dig deep into your mind and soul for answers to your problems but it will also help you finding comfort and strength in your spirit to control your anger penchant.

People with anger issues are taught through anger management techniques to practice better communication skills. Often a fit of anger arises because an individual misunderstood a conversation. Before giving it any thought, they become enraged and filled with anger. Anger management teaches the individual to slow down their thinking, think before they speak or react. The easily angered person needs to listen to the underlying message and try not to jump to conclusions. When feeling on the defensive side, the individual should learn not to fight back. Listening rationally to what the other person has to say might make a huge difference in a reaction.

There are many other techniques and tips which may be helpful if you are requiring help to control your anger tendencies. Tips such as get more rest, get out in nature, find humour in the situation and play or listen to music. There are also many books, movies and websites on the Internet which can provide information regarding anger management techniques and on how to control your anger issues.

How to stop having negative thoughts. Let go of negative thinking as it can become a habit of mind, and it can have a serious, sometimes devastating impact on all aspects of your life. It seems unfortunately that with most people, positive thinking requires some effort, whereas, negative thinking comes easily and often uninvited.

“The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but thought about it. Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking. Separate them from the situation, which is always neutral. It is as it is.” Eckhart Tolle

You must get rid of all your negative thoughts and false beliefs about yourself. You must redirect your frustrated aggression and resentment and find ways to overcome your feelings of loneliness and emptiness.

May I assure you of this: If you’ve never failed at anything, it is certainly that you never really tried anything? Or in the words of Roman philosopher Seneca,“If thou art a man, admire those who attempt great things, even though they fail”

Was Thomas Edison a failure? Of course not. The thought is absurd. Yet dozens of failures preceded most of his brilliant creations. Edison learned from his failures and built his success on them. Discovery is born on error; there are no creations without unsuccessful experiments.

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work” Thomas Edison

This sums up one of the most important lessons that I have learned from life: Blunders, errors in judgement and applications are unavoidable unless we retreat from life into a state of apathy. And even then in that state of idleness, we still make mistake. The secret of successful living is to rise above our failures to our good moments. This is the key concept, to forget our errors, to stop grieving over them, to have compassion for our own human fallibility. Then unburdened with guilt, we can step out decidedly into the world, seeing ourselves at our best, formulating our goals, and bringing out into the game of life, our success instinct.

Never deny your mistakes, admit them freely. But learn from them to minimize your mistakes in future. Be tolerant toward yourself as you would be tolerant toward a friend or you must throttle your experimentation.

“Without failure we can learn nothing, and yet we have learned to treasure success as the only acceptable standard” Wayne W. Dyer

Every day examine the negative beliefs which pull you down. Do you feel stupid? Are you obsessed with the feeling that you are ugly? Or do you torture yourself with the thought that you are weak? I don’t know what negative beliefs you use to determine yourself. But I can assure you that your thinking is irrational. In examining your accusations against yourself, let’s see if you are not being unfair. If you punish yourself as being “stupid”, on what do you base this charge? Granted that you have been unwise, perhaps many times, have you never been wise? Have you never been shrewd? Have you never been intelligent? Then your self-criticism is basically self-mutilation. What it comes down to, is that you feel you have no rights; you believe in short-changing yourself.

OK, sometimes, there might be a grain of reality to them, but are these the devastating indictments that you build them into? No, this is irrational thinking. People are people. The strong are weak, and the weak are strong. Some low-to-medium IQ people have rare common sense. Some homely-looking women are devoted friends and can look beautiful. Some people with physical handicaps are most compassionate. Some emotionally unstable people are extremely brilliant. These are greys; there are no black and whites. But what do you do to yourself with your negative thoughts? You make yourself all thumbs, all negating.

“Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid” Albert Einstein

Now that you have examined your negative beliefs about yourself and are in the process of reducing them to reasonable proportions, let’s see how to stop having negative thoughts about yourself. If you can’t, at least maintain them at the reasonable dimensions so that you can live with them.

Go to the next step now, and visualize a success picture, one that you are really proud of. Fill your mind with it, see it, smell it, feel it, grab hold of this success picture and hold it in your mind. When the critical thoughts counterattack, kick them out, and do this process again and again. You have read and heard about people with a pacemaker in their hearts; who are living so graciously and with peace in mind; learn a lesson from them. Let your self-image be the pacemaker of your heart, your mind, and your soul. Each day reactivate your successful instincts until the success habit becomes part of you. Until it hypnotize you.

So how to stop having negative thoughts; Say to yourself: I shall concentrate on the confidence of my past successes, not on my past failures. I deserve the good things in life. I am the captain of my ship, and I shall steer my mind to a productive goal.

“I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul” William Ernest Henley

To win the war against negative thinking, your failure mechanism, you must be able to break through the disguise behind which it hides. Possible rationalization and seemingly logical thinking may obscure its functioning. Do not fool yourself, or you will lose this wonderful fight for your survival as a contented human being.

“Negative thoughts and tensions are like birds. We cannot stop them from flying near us but we can certainly stop them from making a nest in our mind”

We all desire having a successful life and achieving our goals in no time, but no goal is more vital than dehypnotize ourselves from false thoughts and beliefs which paralyse our success mechanism.

What goals are meaningful, what can you do with yourself if you dwell constantly on thoughts which pull you down into failure? What can you do but sink into a no activity of depression, renouncing all goals, blotting sunshine out of your life, moping dejectedly in a dark room while others go out into world and live?

“You will never be free until you free yourself from the prison of your own false thoughts” Philip Arnold

If you want to have a meaningful life you have to dehypnotize yourself from your false, negative beliefs about yourself. The word “dehypnotize” is not too strong word because so many people have beliefs which are unshakable, which must be jarred out of them. These beliefs so often absurd, cement inferiority complexes formed of unfortunate early experiences and ridiculous misinformation. The result are sad.

Do you believe that your life will be empty because you are an inferior person who has never done anything worthwhile and never will? Do you believe that you should suffer to atone for the mistakes you have made? Do you believe that life has no meaning for you because a loved one has passed away? Do you believe that the only way to live in an atomic age is to spend every day worrying about a nuclear holocaust?

If you think along those or similar lines, you are harbouring false beliefs and thoughts. Granted that you have seen tragedy and that you have your faults, you are still dehypnotizing yourself with false, negative ideas. Worse, you are torturing yourself with them.

“Whatever you believe, with conviction, becomes your reality, whether or not it is true or false” Brian Tracy

These negative thoughts and beliefs have the power to pull us down from our true level as human being. They can disfigure our self-image, and destroy our aspirations for the happiness that is our reasonable expectation.

I would like to spell out the components of the failure mechanism, just as I did for the success mechanism in my previous article “Goal Setting”, since I feel that this aids people in remembering them.

Frustration- We feel frustrated when we fail to achieve important goals or to satisfy basic desires. Everyone feels frustration now and then, because of our imperfect natures and the complex nature of the world. But it is the chronic frustration which is a symptom of failure. When an individual finds himself caught in a pattern of repeated frustrations, he should ask himself why? Are his goals too perfectionist? Does he block his aims with his self-criticism? Does he regress to his feelings as an infant when frustration plus crying resulted in satisfaction? Frustrated rage doesn’t get result; for infants, it may, not for adults. A morbid concentration on one’s grievance of life will make only one’s problems more severe, far better to focus on one’s successes, to gain confidence from seeing oneself winning out. Then one can forge ahead in life.

Aggressiveness- Frustration produces aggressiveness. There is nothing wrong with aggressiveness, properly channelled; to reach our goals we must at times be aggressive. But misdirected aggressiveness is a symptom of failure, usually linked with the setting of inappropriate goals, which the individual cannot achieve. This leads to frustrated rage which the person discharges wildly. Innocent parties become targets to a person trapped in the frustrated aggression; he may snap at his wife for no reason, lash out at his children, insult his friends, and antagonise his co-workers. Furthermore his rage will increase as his relations with people deteriorate. Where does this dreadful cycle end? The answer lies not in the elimination of aggression, but in properly channelling it toward the achievement of goals that bring satisfaction, reducing the unbearable build-up of frustration.

Insecurity- This is another unpleasant feeling; it is based on a feeling of inner inadequacy. When we feel that we don’t meet our challenges properly, we feel insecure. However it is not our inner resources that are lacking; the trouble lies in our setting of perfectionist standards. The insecure person is frequently competent but, living with impossible expectations, he tends to criticize himself constantly. His feeling of insecurity cause him to trip himself up so that he falls short of his true potential.

Loneliness- We are all lonely now and then, but I refer to the extreme feeling of being separated from other people, from yourself, and from life, this is an important symptom of failure. It is indeed one of the leading failure areas of modern civilization; the commonness of loneliness is enough to fill one’s heart with unending sorrow. To know that GOD’s creatures can be so estranged, this is very sad.

Uncertainty- The uncertain person believes that if he doesn’t make a decision, he is safe! He is safe from the criticism he might receive if he took the chance and was proved wrong, safe from consequences of decision he made that backfired. This kind of person must see himself as perfect; therefore, he cannot afford to be wrong. If he make a wrong choice he will destroy his idealized picture of himself, therefore he may linger over a trivial decision for a long time, wasting his precious hours worrying. When he finally does make up his mind, his decision will be subject to distortions, and he will very likely blunder. This uncertain person cannot live fully because he is afraid to take a plunge and get his feet wet.

Resentment- This is the excuse-making reaction of the failure-type personality to his status in life. Unable to bear the pain of his failure, he seeks out scapegoats to take the sting out of his own self-blame. Everywhere he finds evidence that life is short-changing him and he feel resentment. Chronic resentment leads to self-pity because the resentful person feels he is a victim of injustice. The more he pities himself, the more inferior he feels and the more he comes to hate himself and to resent others, and the world. He doesn’t realize that his inner resentment is a breeding ground for failure. Only when he can feel respect for himself, from a realistic image of himself, can he break the habit of resentful thinking which is such a basic component of the failure mechanism.

Emptiness- Do you know people who are “successful”, yet who seem frustrated, resentful, uncertain, insecure, lonely and mismanagedaggressive? Then they have achieved success without tools in their hands. Don’t be too sure that their “success” is real. For many people gain all the outward sign of success and then feel emptiness. They have made money but they don’t know what to do with it. They travel here and there, but nowhere can they escape their feeling of emptiness. They have given up on meaningful goal-setting, they avoid work, shun responsibility, when they wake up in the morning and see the sun, they do not see their opportunities for enjoying the day, instead they worry about what they can do to pass the time. His emptiness symbolizes the total operation of his always present failure mechanism.

These are the elements of the failure mechanism, these are enemy. I have spelled them out for you so that you can remember them easily.

NOW, what can you do about them? HOW can you win your one great war?

War is hellish and if your mind is deeply entrenched in negative concepts, you will have to struggle fiercely to win your battle. But it is a battle worth winning. To live a meaningful life, to rise to your true potential as a human being, you must win this war in your mind. Don’t give up. Keep fighting, and chances are you will win.

“Everything is either an opportunity to learn and grow or an obstacle that keeps you stuck. You get to choose”